The Casa Stefan Zweig is legally regarded as a private charitable organisation, which was founded in 2006 by a group of interested private donors, to establish a museum, that is dedicated to the author, in the last residence of Stefan Zweig and his wife in Petropolis (Brazil).
The house, in which Stefan Zweig and his second wife Lotte resided for 5 months until their joint suicide on February 1942 and where the author had revised his autobiography Die Welt von Gestern and drafted Schachnovelle and his essays about Montaigne, was bought by the association “Casa Stefan Zweig” and the architect Miguel Pinto Guimaraes was commissioned with the renovation and the redesign of the house into a museum.
The museum, that is dedicated to the author, ought to be a memorial for artists, scholars, scientists and other Europeans, who had fled to Brazil, like Stefan Zweig during the National Socialism and who had contributed to the culture, art and science there.
The museum will accommodate a library as well as a conference hall. Beside exhibitions, conferences, competitions, theater and cinema performances, readings and concerts, also cooperations with partner organisations like the Internationale Stefan Zweig Gesellschaft, are planned.
Scientists as well as the general public should have the opportunity, to retrieve online information about Zweig, his work and his literature written in exile. They should furthermore have the opportunity to contribute their own ideas. For this purpose, a bilingual web page will be created by the Casa Stefan Zweig, which will be updated constantly.
The First president of the association Casa Stefan Zweig is the Brazilian journalist and Stefan Zweig biographer, Alberto Dines.
He was honored for his work and was awarded the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Award (AHMA) which was founded/established by the Austrian Service Abroad in 2006.
Since February 2008 the first Austrian Holocaust Memorial Servant has served within the framework of the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service at the association Casa Stefan Zweig.
Famous quotes containing the words stefan zweig and/or zweig:
“Hearing, seeing and understanding each other, humanity from one end of the earth to the other now lives simultaneously, omnipresent like a god thanks to its own creative ability. And, thanks to its victory over space and time, it would now be splendidly united for all time, if it were not confused again and again by that fatal delusion which causes humankind to keep on destroying this grandiose unity and to destroy itself with the same resources which gave it power over the elements.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“Each of us, even the lowliest and most insignificant among us, was uprooted from his innermost existence by the almost constant volcanic upheavals visited upon our European soil and, as one of countless human beings, I can’t claim any special place for myself except that, as an Austrian, a Jew, writer, humanist and pacifist, I have always been precisely in those places where the effects of the thrusts were most violent.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)